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Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

My two oldest children - 13 and 15 - have loudly proclaimed that having a "green bubble" would be worse than death.

We like to fingerwag at social media companies for knowingly negatively impacting children's mental health and self-esteem, yet Apple is aware of how their systems ostracize children, in their own peer groups, who can't afford to carry around luxury phones.

It's one thing to be ostracized by strangers on social media, it's an entirely other thing to be ostracized by your own friends and peers. The latter is tragically more personal and leaks into the real world with real world consequences.

It's a good opportunity to teach your kids about how crappy and shallow other kids can be, and also teach them how to respond to criticism like this.

20 years ago, you'd get shit for not wearing the cool kind of shoes your peers had.

This is it, if it wasn’t the phone it would be something else.

So therefore we let tactics like this slide? It is an intentional mechanism to create FOMO and groupthink by a corporation.

Just because kids are prone to being led in this way, doesn't mean those leading that behaviour get a pass.

What tactics are that? Would Nike have allowed the swoosh to be licensed to every other shoe manufacturer in the 90s?

And kids still get shit for not wearing "cool" shoes!

When I was younger I got teased for not having a Starter brand fitted hat, and I wasn't even into team sports.

This is not about brand, this is more like "you can't participate as an equal in this virtual communal space".

Having a single android user in a group chat means the whole group chat is essentially crippled.

The kids are not being shallow here, Apple is being anticompetitive.

Actually, it just means that the app you are using sucks

I think most kids understand that. It's just that adults reality is way easier - if you don't like some people you just don't spend time with them.

For kids, if you are not friends with people you spend 80% of your time with, you can't get the same kind of friendship elsewhere. The social games they play are way more complex than anything they teach them in school.

The shoes thing is definitely still true in some circles. It's a valuable lesson to teach, but a very hard one. And most people don't internalize it until adulthood. Most parents will shrug and just spring for the iphone rather than listen to the incessant complaints.

There is quite a healthy market for used iPhones if you're talking about the blue bubble phenomenon.

Yeah, my son is entirely too young for a phone right now, but my wife and my plan is to just upgrade every few years and give him one of our old phones. It wasn't too long ago that we did the same thing for our parents.

It's frankly insane that you think that is the solution to this problem.

I don't think you actually understand the problem

Is the iPhone se really luxury? If you are starting from the idea that every teen will have a smart phone, I think apple has blanketed the market with products at all the cost points.

It's pretty luxury nowadays. Decent smartphones go for less than half that cost, and good ones can be even cheaper. The accessibility and affordability of high quality mobile computing devices has risen across the board.

But Apple is very much on the upper mid range to high end side of things.

You can get older iPhones for almost free. And they work fully with iMessage

Locally? Or is there a reputable place online?

I've bought an used SE 2 from refurbed, but it's not available in the USA. There are competitors which do deliver to the USA, e.g. refurb.me: https://www.refurb.me/refurbished/iphone/iphone-se-2

It's its own entire market. Generally I would suggest looking for bigger companies and ones which have policies to replace batteries if they are below a certain health level.

Best Buy has some: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/apple-pre-owned-iphone-8-64gb-u...

> Is the iPhone se really luxury?

If you combine the SE with the local used market, it can get extremely inexpensive. I'm currently rocking an SEv2 that I got for $150.

I'm not saying that $150 is cheap objectively, but in relation to Android phones - even used ones - it stands up pretty well.

This is especially true since Apple supports phones for so long. If you're cost constrained, you can spread the cost of a phone over more years than a typical Android phone.

But with Android you get much more features for the money. All Android phones are bezelless for instance, even the cheapest budget phone. The SE still rocks the iPhone 8 design from 2017 with all its drawbacks.

Personally I don't use Apple because I have far too many things I can't do on it (mostly due to their restrictions in the app store, like using open PGP keys over NFC). But if I did I'd never consider the SE.

its the only iphone model with a physical front button. it will be my replacement come december!

> its the only iphone model with a physical front button.

It's definitely a great feature if you wear a mask often. I find I only have trouble with it if my finger is wet.

I wish Apple would bring back the fingerprint scan. Once my iPhone 8 plus bricks they won't sell me a new 8. Face scanning is too dystopian and violating for me, but any iPhone after 8 requires it. I tried buying the SE to resist this practice, but it's designed to be intentionally tiny and inconvenient to force us neo-Luddites into the current corpo-dystopian era

I miss having TouchID as an option too… but, you can also, you know… just use a passcode and not set up FaceID…?

Also, just curious, what’s the problem with FaceID?

Why is bezelless a “feature” or improvement?

> Why is bezelless a “feature” or improvement?

I mean, it makes the phone smaller for the same screen size. That's an improvement for me.

Not enough for me to drop $$$ on an iPhone-mini, but I'd be happy if Apple put future SEs into an "iPhone 13 mini" body (presumably with a single lens camera).

Because it's optimising the usable surface of the phone of course. The bezels don't serve any purpose other than they were technically necessary during the first years of smartphones.

On a tablet you can use them to hold the device but a smartphone is small enough to grip by the edges only.

And OLED really is a total must-have for me these days.

If the discussion is around phone for kids, I think a second hand SE is still a great choice. Kids don’t really care about the features that you or I would care about.

The screen size/battery size would probably be larger on a price competitive Android phone then the SE, however I doubt you'd get as fast a processor/as many years of software updates either so it really depends what you prefer. I may be biased though having the SE, think I'll only bother to upgrade it when Apple finally switches to USB-C

The SE is so dang small, and I love the 8 Plus's still having a home button and fingerprint sensor. I feel stuck because I don't want having my face scanned (even if Apple says it's not sent to a centralized auth server, it creeps me out).

Is there a reason to allow a tech company to arbitrarily emphasize ostracization and bullying to increase their bottom line?

I know there are common accusations of fan-boyism in both directions but I would hope this community can unite in calling out Apple over their messenger bullshit. Real stakeholders at Apple need to realize how damaging this profit optimization is.

I agree with you but it's not damaging to Apple (much the opposite) so they'll continue to do it.

That is why I'm specifically advocating for us calling them out on it - that makes it damaging to them.

Here’s a crazy idea. Why not fix the problem at the source? Address the entitled behaviour of teenagers.

You mean the behaviour that ancient civilizations already used to complain about? I'd argue changing one UI color would be an easier first step.

If you want to fix teenage rebellion and cliquishness I applaud your efforts. I certainly personally suffered from bullying when I was a teenager over my clothes and haircut and pretty much every other facet of my person so if you can come up with a way for no one to ever endure it again I'd celebrate your achievement. Humanity hasn't managed to impart real empathy on teenagers in thousands of years of existence - we have accounts of rebellious teens from Rome so I assume it's not an easy fix.

So, maybe instead of focusing on bullying we can just focus on punishing companies that profit from bullying.

> So, maybe instead of focusing on bullying we can just focus on punishing companies that profit from bullying.

This is an extreme take. Yes bullying is is a consequence of society. Don’t be lazy and blame someone else for your societies ills. Especially when the solution is simple: encouraging the use of an alternative. No. RCS isn’t the alternative. WhatsApp, Line, Telegram, Signal, Snapchat, TikTok, Discord etc, etc, etc are all mature, are used widely by the rest of the world (where SMS is practically free to use as well). The easier solution, and much cheaper for everyone is to change behaviour. It’s extremely naïve to think that changing the colour of a bubble will stop this sort of bullying.

I don't think adding RCS support is going to instantly solve all the world's ills but Apple is pretty explicit about their reasoning for not supporting RCS: to create a specific and exclusive messenging experience on their phone. This exclusive experience is causing just another thing kids can be assholes about - they are currently and will forever continue to be assholes about a lot of stuff but this particular one is one artificially created by Apple to benefit their profitability. I'm sure in their internal meetings they like to think that exclusivity will only really affect adults and that we're mature enough not to bully each other (which, we mostly are, since the behavior we most bully as adults is bullying itself) but this exclusivity also affects teens that are far less mature. Personally I'd also love it if everyone moved off SMS/RCS in general since it's billed as an extreme luxury by carriers but I don't know if we can make that happen when Messenger comes pre-installed on iOS devices.

I don't assume that fixing a bubble color will fix all bullying but I do stand by your interpretation that I find that changing the color of a bubble will stop all this sort of bullying.

What is more difficult to fix?

Humanity (specifically, teens) or

Apple ( the largest technology company by revenue (totaling US$365.8 billion in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company by market capitalization[0] )

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.

Love that you angryly included the source, like the internet is a debate club. You and all the other pitchfork handlers are assuming Apple actually needs to be fixed for this entirely-made-up and self-imposed issue. They don't. It really is that clear.

But Apple isn't doing any of that.

They invented a ton of new messaging features that SMS didn't support, and the phone has to make it clear which conversations support those and which don't. So they had blue bubbles replace existing green ones.

Ostracization and bullying is what teens do for a thousand different reasons over a thousand different things. Yes Apple is responsible for creating a walled garden of messaging, just like WhatsApp has over most of the rest of the world, and basically every other rich messaging app is trying to do. It's not like Google Allo was trying to be any less walled garden.

But to say Apple is responsible for ostracization and bullying is to take the notion of responsibility too far. Is Supreme responsible for kids who bully other kids because they aren't wearing Supreme...?

Or they could just open iMessage to android...

The average worldwide cost of a smartphone is ~$300.

Android phones can be bought new in box for $50-$170. The iphone SE which is basically last years model starts at $429 and comes without the power bring which allows you to plug into an outlet which costs an additional $18. That is iphones start at a cost more than the majority spend on a phone admittedly worldwide but that isn't what I call all cost points.

> The iphone SE which is basically last years model

The iphone SE is not last year's mode. It's an iPhone 8 body (including camera) with the current CPU. For example, the SEv3 came out this year and has the same CPU as the iPhone 13 which came out at the same time.

Yeah the SE is probably the fastest iphone model there is because the CPU is top notch while the screen resolution is smaller, so rendering is less complex computationally.

I don’t think that any iphone model has trouble with rendering, so it is likely not a bottleneck. Nonetheless, it is an insanely fast phone 2-3 generations ahead of current top android chips.

The Apple website prices only reflect the top end of the iPhone market. The iPhone SE 2nd generation is still sold new directly from low price/prepaid carriers for under half that price (right now $189 on the Tracfone website for example, probably even cheaper elsewhere). Compare that to new Android phones in the same price range which often are loaded with adware/spyware apps that cannot be uninstalled, and blocked from all security/software updates, the longevity makes an older SE competitive with the cheapest 3rd world country android phones in the long term, and with performance that exceeds even the highest end Android phones because of a better cpu.

Is there any point in calculating with worldwide averages? There are people who live on less than a single dollar per day, should we really compare them to first-world citizens who easily spend an order of magnitude more on the way to work?

A new unlocked iPhone 13 Mini device is $850 in Canada. I can buy an unlocked Android smartphone for under $80 that'll do what I need. Though I splurged and spent just under $200 on my last phone. Something that costs 4x as much as a decent mid-range model that will meet most people's needs is luxury.

Most people do not purchase phones and service plans the way I do (separately - I buy an unlocked device up-front then use it with my preferred carrier). So they probably don't think about it like that. It's just an extra $30 a month on their bill for the lease. That really starts to add up, though.

The 128GB Samsung S20FE is $475 CAD today

Well you’re paying for the Samsung brand I guess. There are plenty of cheap and usable Android phones.

I own a Moto G Stylus 5G (256 GB) from 2021 that I paid $240 USD ($330 CAD) for on Amazon earlier this year.

> A new

After having owned a what was already considered 'old' used iPhone for three years, I finally bought a new iPhone, which I expect to use for the next five years.

FWIW - my 5-year-old "original" SE, which was Apple's cheapest phone when I bought it, finally stopped supporting the new iOS version early this month.

Anything that has 87% of the market is by definition mass-market.

Edit: Back in the '90s, PC Magazine had a saying, "the PC you want costs $3,000". This figure was fairly stable despite the improvement in PCs' performance over the decade.

By this standard, and considering that as well as a PC it's a phone, a camera, an atlas and an encyclopedia, a TV and a music player, the iPhone doesn't seem too much like a luxury.

87% of the children*

I wouldn't call Finding Nemo or it's current equivalent mass market even though I have no doubt 87% of children have seen <<insert cultural movie I probably am missing by a generation or two>>.

Why not? A "mass-market" paperback book means unit sales on the order of 100k/year

What level of market penetration would you expect? I would argue that most popular products still have a target vertical.

You don't think finding nemo is mass market?

I would call 'people under 10' to be a targeted market. And it seems Wikipedia agrees:

"The mass market differs from the niche market in that the former focuses on consumers with a wide variety of backgrounds with no identifiable preferences"

"Machrone's Law" as I recall had a $5K price point. And, yes, it held until probably sometime in the 2000s. Yes, PCs were pretty expensive if you consider the PC you "wanted" was probably close to $10K in today's dollars.

You can walk into a prepaid wireless store and grab a new Android phone for $20.

You ever tried that? It's a horrible experience. I love Android but you definitely need to spend much more to get something out of it. My advice is to get a second hand Samsung flagship - I have S9+, that's a great phone you can get for $200 - but don't go for anything less, you'll be very sorry if you do.

A $20 Android phone is better than nothing when you're already struggling to pay bills and raise children. That's the reality many people face.

No, it's so bad it's better to have nothing for a while, save some money and then buy a better phone.

These phones really are so bad. Give it a go. Usually it's a horrible mess of Chinese tracking code, shitware apps you can't uninstall, and it won't be getting any system updates in a year.

Buy an older flagship second hand phone for $20, that's going to be much better experience than a new $20 one, even if it's 5+ years old and doesn't look good anymore.

It is when you need a phone to run apps to do your job or for simple things like banking. Talked to a pest control guy who works for a large company, and he needs a smartphone to do his job. He is quite literally managed through an app, needs it to check-in to work, for time sheets, find out where the next customer lives etc. Someone like that cannot go without a smartphone, requirements like that are leaking into low-level service and retail jobs, now.

No, it's not. Never buy a new $20 phone - it's subsidized by all that tracking and pre-installed shitware and it won't be getting updates soon, if it ever got even one, and the hardware is going to be absolutely terrible too. Buy a second hand one if $20 is all you can spend.

You don't care about bloatware when your first worry is whether you can end up homeless or malnourishing your kids at the end of the month.

You do because your phone isn't usable because of it. Hard to do work on a phone that barely runs the SMS app.

Your Samsung has more tracking and spyware installed you won't be able to uninstall. Never buy a Samsung and expect privacy.

Samsung has unlockable bootloader and good LineageOS support. Unheard of with these $20 phones. And even without flashing, I'd still rather be tracked by Samsung than whatever they put into these $20 ones.

Only some Samsung's have unlockable bootloaders.

Yeah, the flagships do, that's why I'm recommending them.

“ Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. ”

I bought a few of these for testing purposes. Completely unusable.

I just got a backup iPhone SE for $430. It's fantastic. Same chip as recent iPhones. Very decent camera. Better battery life than my 13 pro. Actually fits in pocket. More fun to play games with one-handed. Easily will last 5 years with a case. Not a luxury device, but pretty competitive with what a lot of young people in even middle-income countries would pay for phones.

$430 is a lot to some people.

Average yearly income in India 1875$ iPhoneSE for kids - 430$ I think it’s unobtainable for most of the people

https://www.statista.com/statistics/802122/india-net-nationa...

They mostly use Android in India. This is about the US.

iPhone SE in India isn't $430, it's $607 at today's exchange rate: https://www.apple.com/in/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-se/4.7-inch-... (still, EMI somewhat easily available)

20k-30k for Android phones seems to be the norm there according to the advertisements everywhere.

What about monthly data plans and their recurring costs?

That's another uniquely American atrocity.

$430 is a lot of money though... and probably a lot for a "kids" phone too? You can get previous generation androids that aren't total POS for ~$150, like a Moto G 8-9.

My first smartphone, as a highschooler, was $40 (circle 2014). My first "luxury" phone was a $150 Android.

A $430 price tag IS a lot.

And to top it off the $430 was for a backup phone.

In the US?? It was VERY rare to find a phone that cheap in 2014. I had a Nexus 5 in 2014 and it went for $350 ($437 in 2022 dollars). And that was considered a really good deal/budget phone.

Pixel 6a was on sale a couple weeks ago for $350.

I haven't ever paid more than $500 for a phone, and even that much upset me!

Nexus was a mid/high-end model (google branded), budget android phones are usually from chinese manufacturers like ZTE.

In the US!

I got an 'LG Optimus' phone in 2015 for $125 (after tip and tax, down from the $150 I had in my memory.) I don't have the 2013 receipt for the $40 phone though, that might have been through a WalMart contract.

A new 'Moto G Power' can be had for $150 right now (down from $250) and a new Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 Pro can be had for $220. You can find sub-$50 phones too, especially in the used market.

>tip

What? I want to know more about the circumstances that led to you paying a tip while buying a cellphone. What country was this? What state/province? What store?

(I see that your comment mentions the US and Wal-Mart, but I think both of those are about the $40 purchase and I'm curious about the $125 purchase.)

Haha woops, force of habit! I just meant "tax", not "tip and tax".

I did not realize I was in the habit of saying "tip and tax" to refer to extra fees.

Moto G line has models that are $169 new. You can get older used models for $60 and a line of service for $20 a month. I think people vastly overestimate how much money average people actually spend.

There's a fair number of posts in the thread now pointing out that iPhones are not-that-expensive, and all of them drive up my own engagement with the plight of the people who can't afford one. If you're, say, in a 5% bracket of society who can't afford one, it's all the more awful and potentially debilitating to have a marker on you that flags you as part of the 5%, no?

And at $430 it's still a lot more than 5% in the USA.

If you think a green bubble is the only thing that will mark you for that 5%, that people will judge, you've never been, or known anyone, that was poor.

I neither think so nor said I do - it just happens to be the one we're discussing here, distinctly from the many others.

$430 is getting close to luxury phone. And the features on remotely affordable iPhones are often below or maybe on par with what you used to be able to get from LG for $220 before they sadly stopped.

The chip only matters for gaming really, cheap Android phones have been fast enough for years, and if the price difference is similar to a Switch or something then I'd rather have a dedicated gaming machine if I was really into gaming.

I suppose it also matters for niche stuff like music production, but Android does very well at being a generic multipurpose device for non-enthusiast tasks, and at being cheap enough that you can afford a dedicated device.

The short support period is an issue though.

Is it anywhere near a luxury if 88% of teens can afford it? The iphone starts at $430 and tops out much higher than that, so the ASP is considerably higher.

I don't think it's the teens buying it for themselves.

Feel free to interpret it as 87% of teenagers’ parents can afford to buy (often multiple) iphones for their children. The actual market share of apple in the US is also at around 50%, so I wouldn’t call it luxurious.

Though let’s add that a smartphone is probably the single most used item a person will own (used more often than your shoe), so it does make sense that people will give out quite a sum for these.

You can buy SE 2020's for significantly less, it's just that Apple themselves don't sell those in retail (but are still producing those and selling in gross).

With the SE (and regular 13 & 14) having not-that-great 60 Hrz displays, I could never switch from my 13 Pro to anything else but a 14 Pro (that's why my second phone is a Pixel 6 Pro [or sometimes a OnePlus 10 Pro], as 120 Hrz & 1440p are requirements for a phone to be in my pocket).

I used to have a SE (2nd Gen), prior to ever experiencing a better display, and now I can never go back,

However, if the came out with an SE that did have 120&1440p, I would definitely buy.

This seriously concerns me. I'm almost of the opinion that teenagers should not have phones for anything other than strictly communicating: voice and video calls and messaging. But that cat is out of the bag and now we have people growing up literally addicted to devices that are very detrimental to brain development and intelligence, emotions, socialization, etc.

I remember my parents saying that TV was going to rot my brain... then video games... before that it was comic books. Are there any reputable studies that show having a smart phone is detrimental to the health of a teenager? I've seen studies suggesting social media has a negative influence on the mental health of certain teens, but they aren't one and the same.

I think the difference is that there are fairly conclusive studies showing that social media use, for all ages, can negatively influences happiness. Studies for TV, comics, and games never seemed to be conclusive. They're all very different things. An understanding of one doesn't give an understanding of another. They each deserve their own conclusion. I suspect VR will be the next one in that list.

That's true, but are TVs and comics in your pocket or beside your bed 24/7 like phones? Are they computers that also directly attach you to several friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers instantaneously across several avenues? Do they notify you that you are "missing" something? I don't think there's any example in human history of things that have garnered the daily and sustained use of human attention more than smartphones, tablets, and the Internet.

There is the book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr that covers this stuff and points to research.

There's also the Wall Street Journal article by him called Does the Internet Make You Dumber?.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704025304575284...

What is the difference to Nike providing kids with flashy shoes when the sole purpose is class and coolness? According to the same report, Nike is the most preferred fashion brand among teens.

At least with Apple's message indication you know you're getting encryption and thus privacy from carriers. Would it be less problematic if Apple simply mentioned "warning: this is unencrypted SMS"?

Apple is free to open the iMessage ecosystem if they'd like to allow Android to send encrypted messages to iPhones as well. The truth is that Apple isn't doing this to help customers identify unencrypted messages. They are doing this for the network effect.

They are doing this for the network effect.

This is what people in the hate-Apple echo chamber like to chant, but it's wrong.

When Apple started doing it, there was no network effect.

The color choice was made years before everyone started freaking out about green and blue bubbles.

It was done to show that a message went over SMS, and not iMessage at a time when many Americans paid for each SMS sent, but iMessages were data, and thus included in data plans.

  Blue=free
  Green=10¢

It served as a warning that you were spending money. I suspect that's why it's green.

Before iMessage (yes it existed) all text messages were green. Blue denoted iMessage. There was no evil plan from Apple like bloggers love to conceive for attention - it’s merely what was originally chosen and they wanted to differentiate iMessage when they released it.

You know why they wanted to differentiate iMessage? It caused issues with SMS. They knew it. They wanted an easy out for the incompatibilities. It is a problem with the "plebs" not Apple. The "plebs" were just holding their phones wrong. After all, even iPhone users don't know how to hold their phone. How can "plebs" be expected to know how to hold their phones if iPhone user can't?

Apple could fix this if they wanted to, but they don't want to. They know it sells phones. It is intentional.

No they did it so you knew when it was in and could use the features. There’s no “issue” with SMS.

Tell that to all the people who cannot respond to group messages sent to them from iPhone users.

https://www.android.com/get-the-message/

SMS quotas and mobile data are two different “budgets” depending on carrier. It would be a huge omission if they didn’t differentiate between them.

At what time has data ever been cheaper than SMS? That "Blue=free Green=10¢" would likely only have been true for people on really crummy plans sending a message while connected to Wi-Fi. Data has never been "free". They would have had to show iMessage messages as green when sent over the phone network.

It was to mark the "plebs" so the "plebs" would be blamed for any issues rather than Apple.

I think that data plans used to be expensive (I avoided getting a smartphone until 2014 because of the costs), but once you had a data plan for other reasons (e.g. being able to browse the web) then messaging apps were a cheaper way to send a message on the margin. My cheap minutes-only plan with AT&T back in 2008-2011 charged me $0.20 per SMS sent and received, which added up fast with unsolicited messages, but eventually I found the option to just block all SMS to save money (yes, I was just oblivious to whatever people sent me for a couple years, and it probably wasn't good for my social life...).

> At what time has data ever been cheaper than SMS?

Phone plans used to come with a limited number of SMS messages per month (or even none), and the rates per SMS if you went over the limit were beyond extortionate.

>Since BlackBerry messages are sent as data, users do not incur individual charges for each message as they would through regular SMS texting. While phone companies have introduced bulk texting plans, many options still include caps on the number of individual SMS messages that can be sent. BBM has no such limit.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/why-is-bbm-so-suc...

> Phone plans used to come with a limited number of SMS messages per month (or even none), and the rates per SMS if you went over the limit were beyond extortionate.

But wasn't cellular data priced similarly extortionately back then?

It was certainly too expensive, but nowhere near as expensive as paying twenty five cents for an SMS message that maxed out at 140 bytes.

Before iPhone or Android existed, Blackberry was very popular with teens because you got unlimited messaging on Blackberry Messenger included with the data plan you got with a Blackberry.

Eventually there were cell phone plans where you could add unlimited SMS for an additional fee regardless of what phone you used.

By the time the iPhone rolled around, all the American iPhone plans included unlimited SMS messages without an additional fee.

>But wasn't cellular data priced similarly extortionately back then?

I guess it depends on your terms. I had--I think--a 2GB per month data plan (which was actually fairly reasonable for mobile at the time) and later went to "unlimited" but I was still paying something like 10 cents per text for a time. I didn't text a lot so I just paid a la carte until I changed plans.

Communications charges have changed a lot over time. I remember when long distance calls were something like $1/minute.

> Communications charges have changed a lot over time. I remember when long distance calls were something like $1/minute.

I can remember Verizon being sued because they forced handset manufacturers to disable Bluetooth for file transfers, because Verizon used to charge you money every time you transferred photos to or from your phone.

The carriers used to completely own the entire phone experience. That's what really changed with Android and iOS. Walled gardens notwithstanding, you have access to a far less restricted and curated set of applications.

Yes, but if you had wifi iMessage was essentially “free”. I always though of it as message went over the internet, vs message went over SMS.

iMessage was released 11 years ago now. Can’t blame Apple for what not considering what the toddlers of the time would eventually do with the technology.

Basically, anywhere in EU. SMS is unreasonably expensive/limited, on top of being all around shitty (like, bad encoding, utf8 chars taking up more space, the amount of time I had to remove ős from my texts so that it would fit in a single SMS), and is plain text for your carrier to read.

Apple executives literally said in the leaked email, that they are doing it for the network effect.

The EU's Digital Markets Act might force that.

Only reason its not encrypted is because Apple won't allow it to be.

Citation needed. Is this really true? I keep hearing about RCS etc but I also keep hearing it's not actually a good standard. Not even sure it does encryption frankly.

You haven't looked that much into it then; RCS has encryption[0], and works great for me. (I have an iPhone 13 Pro & a Pixel 6 Pro. RCS works as well as iMessage for Android-to-Android devices, for me.)

[0]: https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf

Is that RCS having encryption or is that Google providing an extension to RCS only with their Messages app? And to what degree does RCS with encryption have buy-in from American carriers?

RCS is an open source protocol that can be run by different 'operators'[0]. So it's not so much as an extension, as Google's implementation of the protocol (which is open source and can be added by other operators).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services

Sounds like whatever remained from Google Reader’s API.

> RCS is an open source protocol

No, no it isn't.

There is nobody preventing Apple from developing an Android app for iMessage. They already have a bunch of apps on the play store, including one for Apple TV, Beats, and a migration app for iOS. https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Apple

Apple can’t provide the same assurance that an android app is secured.

The degree that matters is of course debatable, but it is one of their talking points.

Apple can't provide assurance that browsers are secured, but they allow for iMessage in browsers.

Last I checked you can’t send an iMessage from a windows browser only read messages you had personally uploaded to iCloud.

Presumably they run security tests on 3rd party Mac browsers, it’s a major security concern.

Nobody really preventing GM from developing OnStar systems for Ford, Toyota, VW, etc. cars, either.

My power tools have proprietary battery's too. I buy the same brand over and over because of owning batteries already. This type of stuff is just business 101 and it’s not exactly meant to be in anyone but the company’s best interest. It can be seen in almost all industries.

Nobody prevented Microsoft from creating a Youtube app for Windows Phone.

Oh, wait. Google prevented Microsoft from creating a Youtube app for Windows Phone.

How is a Microsoft-authored app connecting to Google's YT servers comparable to an Apple-authored app connecting to Apple iMessage servers?

How does Google have the nerve to whine about iMessage after they used Youtube as a weapon to kill Windows Phone?

Nothing to do with nerve, and everything to do with self interest.

Do you think Google (or any organization) is capable of shame? I could extend your question to "How could Microsoft whine about Google shutting down its Youtube API access, while Microsoft was shaking down Android OEMs with secret patents and forciing them to make Windows phones as part of the (secret) settlement?" or "How can Apple ramp up its ad products when it rails against Google/Facebook ads?". The answer to all of those questions is self-interest.

> Nothing to do with nerve

People don't seem to agree with you. Google screwing up it's own messaging strategy for a decade and then whining about the consequences of their own decisions shows a lot of nerve.

> Google has been unable to field a stable, competitive messaging platform for years and has thoroughly lost the messaging war to products with a long-term strategy. At least some divisions inside the company are waking up to how damaging this is to Google as a company, and now Google's latest strategy is to... beg its competition for mercy? Google—which has launched 13 different messaging apps since iMessage launched in 2011—now says, "It's time for Apple to fix texting."

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/new-google-site-begs...

I don't think Google would prevent Apple from publishing an app on the play store. There are already many messengers on it.

RCS (as in: the standardized version) isn’t encrypted. Google’s proprietary extensions to RCS provide the encryption layer [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services

It's the same old story of perfect being the enemy of good (plus clear ulterior motives for Apple).

Adding RCS compatibility would negatively impact precisely zero iPhone users, and would positively impact literally everyone (including iPhone users!).

RCS may have its warts, but I do not see Apple proposing a better standard? Everyone agrees SMS/MMS is about as bad as it can be... and there's already a lot of industry buy-in outside of Apple for supporting RCS.

Get with the program Apple...

Visit matrix.org for a better standard

> https://www.android.com/get-the-message/

RCS is supported by most carriers, and over 500 device manufacturers. But not Apple.

*Only in the US. It has some adoption outside the US.

Because wearing Nike's doesn't visually highlight every person's shoes on the basketball court that doesn't have Nikes.

Sure they do; that’s what the big logo is for

They highlight themselves but they don't highlight other shoes in a negative light.

I’m not sure how you can reasonably argue that the chosen shade of green is a negative light on android texts. Any negativity is generated by the social systems interacting with it — the colors, and logos, just give enough information for those social systems to differentiate, and qualify, and judge your usage of, these objects.

Apple hasn’t done much of anything to say android texts are bad… they’ve just said they’re not iPhone texts (and iPhone—>iPhone has better texting). Everyone else came along and said android is for poor people, and used those green bubbles as a signal to act on — just the same as using the logo to judge your shoes.

Apple knew this would happen and promoted that social behavior on purpose.

> What is the difference to Nike providing kids with flashy shoes when the sole purpose is class and coolness?

Maybe what Nike is doing is just as bad...

Well, should we mandate grey boxes for every item out there, with a bland label differentiating them from each other only?

Actually, from an environmental standpoint I would be okay with doing that for food items/detergent/etc. Mandate the same form factor and just wash them out and reuse. But for clothing items it hardly makes sense, as a big part of you buying that is exactly the different look.

How do you know that? Because apple says so?

Key exchange happens through apple. App is proprietary and as far as I know the apple devices upload to the apple cloud in a way that makes apple able to read the messages by default.

iPhones aren't luxury phones, sheesh.

Their flagships are, sure, but the SE is extremely competitive in the US, especially when you consider their longevity and support. And then of course there's the used market.

I mean, if 87% of teens own an iPhone, then that's very much by definition NOT luxury, as luxury is necessarily exclusive to some degree.

> I mean, if 87% of teens own an iPhone, then that's very much by definition NOT luxury.

Yeah this is the point. Apple has a strong brand and pricing tactics that places itself as a high-end company. This branding works really well and Apple is perceived as luxury by many people, but the truth is that it creates consumer products and there's no luxury in that. If the iPhone was a luxury you wouldn't find it everywhere in almost all high schools. Luxury doesn't dominate a mass market.

Some tech guys seems to think that value comes solely by a sort of price/performance ratio. If you can get MORE POWER for less money then you are getting ripped off. The rest of the price is not justified, you aren't paying for anything else so you must be paying a luxury premium. That's really a shallow way of analysing apple products. You pay more because the following is included: long time support (software updated and that continues to work without random behavior for 5yrs), really high quality control and higher quality components (no things that randomly stop to work after one or two years), great customer and tech support (yeah, non-tech people actually need it), seamless software integration, privacy and security guarantees. There are so much more things included in apple devices beside than tech specs and people find a lot of value in that.

If the situation goes on, the US will go back to the spot when ATT was a monopoly for anything telecomms.

Humans never learn.

You can get a new Android phone for $20. The charging cables alone for an iPhone, which don't come with the phone, cost $19 each by themselves.

The original cables do. You can buy much cheaper cables on Amazon and elsewhere.

Some cheaper Lightning cables don't work properly. Some don't work at all.

What are you talking about? No you can't.

If you're talking about an unlocked smartphone that you can install apps on, there is absolutely no such thing as a new Android phone for $20 that any American consumer can buy.

The Samsung Galaxy A03s is Samsung's cheapest, it's considered "ultra-budget", and it costs $160. The Moto G Pure, Motorola's cheapest, is also $160.

(Edit in response to comments: yes if you buy a locked phone with a plan you can obviously get it cheaper upfront, but you're just dividing the remaining cost monthly. It's not actually cheaper. You can also get iPhones "for free" upfront if you pay for them on installment plans either bundled with a plan or separate from one -- so "prices" for locked phones are utterly meaningless for comparing the cost of iPhone vs Android.)

I am 100% sure parent meant $200, not $20.

Just for the sake of argument, there are brand new android go phones in amazon. So, if you need a phone you can install apps on, $50-$200 being the base price, you can consider $1000 a luxury.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=android+phone&i=mobile&rh=n%3A707...

Seeing as they were directly comparing a $20 phone with a $19 cable implying they were the same price, it seems to me like they actually meant $20. ;)

On the other-hand, plenty of people will buy a locked phone direct from a carrier. The Moto G you mentioned only costs $35 from tracfone. You can't change carriers, but you still can install arbitrary apps.

And as mentioned, you can buy any top end iphone for likely free with a sufficiently expensive plan, how is that relevant? You do pay for the full price (often multiple times).

> If you're talking about an unlocked smartphone that you can install apps on, there is absolutely no such thing as a new Android phone for $20 that any American consumer can buy. Or even close to it.

Hardly anyone buys a phone unlocked in the US. Most buy carrier locked devices and at the low end, it's mostly prepaid. I just bought a Samsung A03 from target that was for prepaid carrier Total Wireless for $10. I didn't activate it, I just use it for testing a mobile app on a lower spec phone.

> The Moto G Pure, Motorola's cheapest, is also $160. Right now, you can get a Moto G Pure for $49 from three different no-contract pre-paid carriers at Wal-Mart.

Come on, that’s just not the “price” of a thing by any sane definition, or otherwise I would be very happy how cheap I got my home for..

Ok, I'll be sane. I bought a Samsung A03 at Target, off the shelf, in store for $20. It was on sale from it's regular price of $49.

Erm. Every iPhone comes with a lightning cable in the box. You can also buy lightning cables from other manufacturers for considerably less than $19. Get your facts right.

Absolutely absurd statement.

Is this similar to the "trauma" suffered by teens that wore Levi's Jeans that didn't have the Red Tab, back in the 80s and 90s? To compare a green text bubble to mental health issues is offensive.

I'm pretty certain that a lot more interaction occurs through phones than through jeans.

As an adult, some of my friends have asked me to switch to an iphone so they could use imessage features in a group chat. It's not hard to imagine being left out of a group for this reason. I don't think I've met a girl in my age group who has anything other than a negative opinion of "Android Users." This stuff doesn't bother me, but I can see how it would upset kids.

I'm ignorant, but what are the features in group chats that Android people don't get? The heart/emoticon bubble things? I used to do group chats with my last Android phone, but now that I have iPhone...I just have too much anxiety to open these chats and respond, because I don't want to hear the notification sound buzz in triplicate over the next hour. I dislike my phone and using it so much that it's making me socially isolated.

Apparently adding a new member to a group text with an android user is a much less pleasant experience than if everyone is on imessage. I'm the android user causing problems so I dont really know the details :P But honestly that the guy singled out the "one android user" who was making his life difficult was disconerting to say the least.

I almost always have my phone on silent for that reason. I like to check my phone when I want to, not when it wants me to.

It would be great if the general population would switch to another messaging app (or better yet a protocol that multiple clients support). I get the sense that this is how WhatsApp is used in other countries. It feels like a real regression to be using SMS based messaging in 2022. Seems like iMessage succeeds only by sheer numbers and ignorance of the general population.

There are a lot of things that succeed due to the ignorance of the population

Yes. WhatsApp is a hideous and bloated app and there are far better solutions.

Messaging is pretty fascinating. WhatsApp, KakaoTalk, WeChat, Line, Telegram, iMessage all so strongly dominate their respective set of countries/regions and a lot of them have their own distinct set of user mannerisms/memes.

I thought this was funny when I went to work in Korea for a year, as an American, with a bunch of other Americans; all of us stationed there in the military. Upon arrival, the other Americans immediately told me: "You need to get Kakao. It's how you text in Korea." I complied, but I often made the point that it was just another mobile app that they could install and use even back in the United States, and something like Hangouts would work just as well in Korea. When I moved back to the United States, I kept using Kakao to stay in touch with some of my old co-workers who were still in Korea, and this blew their minds, including some people who were otherwise quite tech savvy.

Note that I don't think many of us were using Kakao to talk with native Koreans, which would be a good reason for using it. Honestly, we didn't mix much. Nearly everybody on my contact list was an American.

I can relate - I also spend 4 years living and working in Korea. And I also still have Kakao group chats filled with just other expats including gyopo, in addition to the ones with native friends. :)

Kakao is in many ways kind of the worst of chats - phone number-bound, unspec'd, closed, non-federated, unencrypted, known to be under surveillance, ad-infested. But on the other hand around 2010-2015 the UX was quite ahead of many others, and while Telegram & co have since pulled ahead it's still nicer than, say, WhatsApp or Signal.

I was using it in 2014-2015, and yeah I thought the UX was fine at that time. I did have the foresight to tie my account to my US Google Voice number (which has long been my primary number), so I didn't lose the account when I returned to the US and lost my KT phone number. I think that's what tripped up the other Americans who thought it was only an option in Korea.

It's similar in Japan. Everyone here uses LINE, and AFAICT, absolutely no one does SMS texting any more. I don't even know the phone numbers of any of my friends here; everyone just exchanges LINE contact info by QR code and that's it. The only time anyone uses a phone number seems to be for non-personal purposes (e.g., calling a business or government office), and the only time SMS seems to get used is for automated messages from official places (like your utility companies).

A lot of people here have iPhones, but it's not because of some stupid blue bubble.

What's funny is that Americans will sometimes make fun of Japan because some people (mainly businesses, maybe some elderly people) still use FAX, but Americans are the ones who are all still using SMS.

This is indeed how WA is being used.

I have few friends with iphones here in Spain and of those all of them use WhatsApp. Not sure if they use iMessage with other Apple users but nobody ever uses it to SMS me (and if they did I would tell them to use something secure)

The main messaging apps in use here are WhatsApp (#1 by far), Telegram (used a lot for groups) and sometimes signal.

I've never had a friend suggest something else like Google, iMessage or Facebook/Instagram. I'm not on any of those anyway (even though I have an Android phone I don't use a Google account with it).

Telegram has existed for a good number of years and despite all the hate from HN is the Ukrainians (and Russians) preferred way to share news (not military secrets, obviously).

> Apple is aware of how their systems ostracize children, in their own peer groups, who can't afford to carry around luxury phones.

Tell me about it. Audi, BMW, Ferrari and Lamborghini have been ostracizing me, and so have all the gas stations around where I live! Not only that, but Microsoft, developers of pro software, movie theaters, restaurants, travel agents, lawyers and hookers! The nerve of them all to exclude me from their products and services simply because I can't afford them. It's very cruel and so arbitrary.

I think people here take issue with the walled garden model of an intra-device comm protocol, not the price point or desirability of iPhones. The comparison to luxury cars is especially crude because it's an industry far more tightly regulated to the benefit of customers than any section of consumer electronics.

> I think people here take issue with the walled garden model of an intra-device comm protocol, not the price point

GGP specified ostracizing by Apple of those "who can't afford to carry around luxury phones." Now you are suggesting that Apple excludes communication from non-Apple customers by using an "intra-device comm protocol," which I believe most refer to as iMessage. I'm pretty sure it was conceived to save the user from paying for SMS and MMS, or at least being a relief to use of those for-pay protocols, and the dreaded "green bubble" merely an indicator that the cell provider may be charging for it.

The idea of competing for space here seems to be very popular, and there are many alternatives, such as WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, Kik, Signal, and many others. I just had the strongest sensation of deja vu, no, yes... something... do you at all remember IRC, IRQ, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Jabber, MSN Messenger, Google Talk? I don't recall anyone complaining about iChat or any of the other services mentioned for being exclusive, which they all are.

Are you sure the grievance is legitimate? Where were the complaints before with the legacy chat apps? What makes Apple deserving of special scrutiny while every other message service with similar exclusivity is doing nothing wrong?

I also don't see how Apple is responsible for narcissistic parents raising bullies and shitheads. Innocent kids being ostracized really could be, and I think really is, the responsibility of bad parents.

Let's put it this way: I am largely on board with your line of reasoning, in so much that you're forcing people to make up their mind on what they're really upset about and what the root problems are. :-)

For myself and my own grievances, I'm not a fan of comm protocols that don't allow an open market of clients and servers to exist and to interoperate. I much prefer using the ones that do, and so I do a lot of my group chatting on Matrix in the social spaces where I can. The "green bubble effect" and who gets to control it adds another to my list of reasons to want the more open systems to be well-made and prosper, although it's not a primary driver.

I think you have a nice intentionally harmless approach to this, but I'm still not sure how iMessage is exclusive of other protocols rather than conveniently saving the users from cell providers' charges for SMS and MMS when possible. iMessage still supports SMS and MMS, and it only prioritizes its iMessage protocol when messaging other Apple device users. I don't use iMessage and never have, but my understanding is it communicates to Android users, other smartphones and even dumbphones though the cell providers' SMS and MMS services. Seems like the only ones that should have any complaint here are cell providers for being undermined and cut out of their instant messaging revenues.

My take here is that if iMessage is truly a Better Tool, I'd be great if it was available on any computer that fulfills the hardware requirements to participate. For example, Apple could release an iMessage app for Android (and if they priced it fairly, this would still be cheaper than an iPhone, yet still turn them a profit). Or release specs so others can do so.

Do I think they should be or should feel obligated to do so? I'm not sure. I think society is having a debate about whether modern communication networks have "public infrastructure"-type characteristics and need to be regulated more in general, and this is probably also a question on that spectrum to a degree. Let's say I wouldn't be surprised if one day we come to the conclusion that the answer is yes and a larger functionality scope for what is considered basic interoperability is important to us, but there are also some good arguments against it.

Another angle to approach it from is the spectrum of arguments pro and con of bundling/unbundling of hardware and software/services (i.e. need-iPhone-to-iMessage). Governments which run environmental certification/badging schemes for example are increasingly expanding them to apply to software and considering or enacting rules that are decidedly against bundling with HW. The reason is that it tends to cause more frequent hardware replacements to stay compatible with SW/services and therefore a larger energy/carbon footprint - unbundling allows legacy HW to keep going longer on average. A project along these lines I was tangentially involved with myself was the research to expand Germany's "Blauer Engel" label to software.

What guides my thinking here is a bit overboard and flowery again, and also personal. As a software engineer and teenager myself I cut my teeth on making and maintaining one of the better-known IRC clients at the time; this was my first project that really had other users project part of their lives into it, hours at a time. For me it was quite powerful when I realized that I knew people who had met using my chat software and later gotten married and started families. It solidified my view of the engineer as a supportive toolmaker for others to better live their lives and build civilization. The modern day equivalent to the people who conceived of and made the flint tools others would use to start the fires to tell stories around. Comm tools being broadly available and interoperable and their social effects are stuff close to my heart, and stories of folks suffering from lack of access that isn't due to real technical barriers just aren't great, even knowing the complex economics driving the situation.

> if it was available on any computer that fulfills the hardware requirements to participate

Thank you, that's the walled garden perspective I was missing, same as the complaint of those that want to run macOS on non-Mac hw. Usually the walled garden complaints are from the other side of the wall, Apple device users being prevented from installing what they want unless it is already available from AppStore. I didn't consider the other side of that wall.

Yes, sorta. But I think the case of a chat protocol and "Apple should make macOS available for all PCs" are still a bit different.

For example, speaking personally I have no gripe if Apple doesn't want to write an iMessage app for Android, but I think it would be great if the specs and/or APIs were available so that others could write one, even without reaching for one of the regulation-style arguments mentioned above.

Both imply asking Apple to spend effort. With putting macOS on PCs the effort is obvious. But making it possible for others to write an iMessage client also requires effort: For example designing iMessage's technology in such a way that a malicious client can't compromise the system, keeping the protocol relatively stable and sanely versioned, documentation, and so on. With my engineer's hat on, as an opinion, I think this type of effort would contribute to make iMessage better tech as it's in line with the nature of a strong comm protocol, while macOS doesn't benefit as clearly from being on other computers.

The main counter-argument to it is the notion that walled-garden messengers have innovated faster on UX than the standardized ones and then you're back to unresolved quibbles about what's user value and so on. I don't think we've found the one true way to better-tool-to-more-people yet.

iPhones aren't luxury in 2022. They cost no more than Samsung and Google models today.

The low end goes way lower with one than the other. And that's important for everyone who's not as privileged as you and me. And believe me, an iPhone (any brand new unit), just as the Pixel or the Galaxy S22 are way unaffordable to a huge swath of the population. That being said, the low end of Android phones is quite good and quite quite cheap.

It's like saying that there are Lamborghinis that cost as much as a Nissan GT-R Nismo. Yes, that may be so (even if it isn't in reality). But your Nissan Altima is way more affordable to way more people.

You act as if they don’t make cheap and relatively accessible phones. They do. iphone se is a perfectly good phone that can be bought new for $400. Sure it’s not at the absolute bottom end of the market, but it is fairly accessible when you compare it to their flagship phones.

Maybe America is different but to me 400 for a phone isn't cheap. If poor people in the US are buying their children $400 phones then they can shut up about high living costs.

I'd consider my ~$130 Oppo to be the upper end of cheap with NFC and snappy performance.

In the current context, "cheap" is used in comparison to base configs of flagship smartphone models, such as Galaxy S22, Pixel 7 Pro, and iPhone 14. All of which tend to go for $700+. And that's not even mentioning the luxury models like foldable Galaxy ZFold4 going for $1.7k+.

Sure, I wouldn't count a brand new $400 smartphone to be the most budget one, but it is almost half the price of a flagship. And that's not even getting into the used market.

Apple phones also last long enough, barring accidents, that if the adults are using iPhones, the kids can probably get hand-me-downs that're still usable and receiving updates for at least a couple years.

You can buy a new Android phone for $20. A $400+ phone, with a $19 charging cable that is not included, is a luxury for many people.

The cable is included - https://www.apple.com/iphone-se/specs/

Sorry, I meant a charging adapter.

Just because manufacturers have inflated the prices over the years that doesn't make $400 cheap.

My current $200 phone is better in every aspect than the high end flagship phones not too long ago. With its performance and features it's still far from the low end.

On the other hand, this seems like a teachable moment, where perhaps kids can be encouraged not to marginalize others based on trivial differences in messaging apps. The drumbeat of inclusivity is pretty loud these days so it shouldn’t come as too great a surprise that including their green bubble friends would be the decent thing to do.

I don’t place much blame on Apple for completely stereotypically standard teenage attitudes. If it wasn’t green bubbles it would be uncool sneakers. The answer is not to force interoperability (though that would be great!), but for parents to help their kids grow out of these tribalizing behaviors.

It's not just a trivial difference in bubble color. SMS conversations in iMessage lose features. The social rejection is a result of the features lost when an Android user participates in a messaging group.

The social rejection is a result of teens being teens, as pointed out. Adults would use another more inclusive tool, like whatsapp, email, discord, rss, etc.

I and most adults I know have never used those apps. We’re also on our ~15th iphone

You've never used email?

Not with my friends. It’s also a protocol which can be used on pretty much all devices with your pick of clients so was a bad example in the list.

15th iPhone?

I'm 50 and I'm still on my 1st Android phone (which is a piece of crap, but I have an environmental responsibility to use it as long as possible and it still does perfectly good phone things like SMS and voice and DCSS). I've owned maybe four mobile phones in my whole life.

I guess you're creating employment. See: https://www.who.int/teams/environment-climate-change-and-hea...

Most people use their phone for far more than SMS and "phoning" these days. You are an anomaly these days. That's neither good nor bad, it just is.

Agree GP is an anomaly and will say 15 could be an exaggeration a bit. I don’t know really but iPhone has been around a long time now and people seem to replace typically every 1-2 years.

Not in most European or African countries, majority is on pre-paid, and phones only get replaced when there is an actual reason, not that two years have gone by.

~80 % market share for contracts (post-paid) in Germany: https://www.statista.com/topics/7772/mobile-communications-i...

I said Europe, not Germany.

I'm on a post paid contract but i haven't had a phone subsidy in a long time. If you want a "free" iphone/android you can lease the phone (effectively it's a personal loan paid back over 2 years).

~75%

And post-paid mobile contracts don't mean that the phone is paid for by the contract.

Like the others say, I too have a post-paid without a phone. I personally don't know anyone with a bundled phone, because why would you do that? I pay 8€ per month and change the phone whenever I want.

15th phone in total, would be fairly average for someone who has had mobile phones for 30 years. I suspect that's what the GP meant. Smartphone adoption is still not anywhere universal and many, many, are still on their first smart phone since a few years back.

He specifically said 15th iphone. iphones have been around for 15 years.

Yeah that was me, and I am talking iPhone. Don't try to overanalyze the "15". There's nothing scientific about it I just made it up and put the tilde in front. Didn't realize it would be the focus of such debate. It could be 10 or 20. Most people I know were early adopters and have replaced every 1-2 years and have also probably broken a couple along the way requiring early replacement. I'm also not claiming my observation is representative of anything other than that, I'm sure it wouldn't match some larger dataset. It's biased by a ton of factors. I was trying to point out 2 things;

1) we've used iphone's since the beginning and are pretty loyal, would likely never consider non iPhone

2) we don't tend to switch apps for "inclusivity" as the original comment parent stated. We blatantly exclude people that are not on the Apple product ecosystem by being rather inflexible to even try the universe of platform agnostic options (WhatsApp, etc).

This is my experience in the US. Basically, we're acting like the teenagers except in a not so mean and judgemental way.

I do, and I am still on my second...

I'm on my fifth smartphone (since 2009). But I've always used Android. It could be that iOS users are more inclined to replace perfectly working hardware.

Not all of us.

Gigantic phones are off putting. Every few years Apple tries making a mini and that’s the time to buy.

I’m fairly tall and have size appropriate hands (I think). I struggle to reach the top corners of my 12 mini. It’s very irritating.

Most people in Europe only replace their phones when they die, get stolen, or lost.

Other than a few lucky ones, we aren't big fans of contracts, replacing phones every two years, we enjoy our pre-paid variants, and only replacing them when it actually is required.

Even when we use it for more than just SMS and calls.

Still happily using a Nokia which outlasted several iPhones (all of them had terrible microphones in my experience).

Is this based on your personal observations or can you back that up with any meaningful statistic?

I know both people that get the latest iPhone every year, and people still on a Nokia 3310(-equivalent), but the latter are in the vast minority in my circle of friends, also in Europe.

Personally, I've been upgrading every 2-3 years (not on a contract), and the phone was never broken.

This is a result of adults being teens. Some people get comfortable.

Ok, so you're likely either not bothered by the messaging differences or not don't experience them.

Now take a moment to imagine someone tries to tell you that your messaging system makes you not desirable in a group. What do you do as an adult? Spend extra money to comply with their ideas, or tell them to either use alternatives, or get over it? Does the fact you've never used those apps even factor into the decision?

For context, in many places outside of the us the question is simply "which app do you use" and then you use that like an adult that you are.

As I said, everyone I know is on apple so no I don’t notice the difference. I have seen a couple occasional when non Apple users are on a group text and it breaks some things.

I can totally see how teens are judging each other on this. They’re judgmental creatures in search of social cues to judge you on. Having android is analogous to wearing cheap Walmart clothes in my day. You’re social clout takes a huge hit.

I get it and have empathy, but no solutions as I really think it’s kids being kids and I don’t think Apple as a business should be regulated towards an open protocol (only actual solution).

I’ll never know what it’s like to be a teen that texts or has a smart phone because I didn’t experience it. But I hear teens don’t care about cars these days and that was a crucial part of being a teen with a thriving social life where/when I grew up. You’d get teased for not having one or having a old/ugly one. You were excluded from social activities if you couldn’t find transportation. You couldn’t take someone out on a date and it actually impacted whether you were even worth dating. And, it was very expensive for a teenager.

The difference with adults is we don’t give each other a hard time about it. Or too much anyways. We will however absolutely refuse to use whatever app you ask us to if we’re am not using it already. We’re also probably not using it already. Most of us bought iPhone at the beginning and have never really considered anything else. That’s why we’ve owned so many of their phones.

I’m not European but I find the idea that I should accept I have to context switch between apps based on who I’m talking to be insane. All my texting is in one app, just like email, phone, maps, etc. I might be simplistic but apps are pretty sticky for me once I choose a default for _activity_. I might be wrong, but if I remember correctly the reason the texting apps exploded over there was because you all had bad or expensive SMS originally. iMessage didn’t exist until 2011/iOS 5 and was likely Apple’s response from competition from rapidly growing companies like WhatsApp.

To be best, I don't believe this:

> We will however absolutely refuse to use whatever app you ask us to if we’re am not using it already.

First, because there's a first you use every app. Second, because if you do chat with someone without imessage regularly, you'll want to upgrade to something. If you refuse because of tech... you didn't care enough about that person to begin with.

> If you refuse because of tech... you didn't care enough about that person to begin with.

This has been every iPhone user I've ever found. I've been willing to use any messaging system and have tried many. But not a single iPhone user I know uses anything other than iMessage. And they blame me.

Welcome to adulthood. Adults can be just as stupid, hypocritical, uncaring, and ruthless as anyone else.

In europe, most iphone users use alternative message platforms for everything, and nobody in wider groups use apple's one. US is simply in its own PR-massaged albeit huge bubble, nothing more

SMS is basic, lacks features. A company builds messaging software that falls back to SMS when it's not communicating with someone who uses their software. They bundle it in their OS and set it as default. They are so successful that lot of people never even consider using other products, because "everyone" is using it. Users of the software defend these actions and consider it great, often admitting that they haven't even tried alternatives because "everyone" is using it.

How is this different from Microsoft, Windows and IE?

Why switch context? Everybody that matters to everybody I now is on whatsapp. I actually like this distinction Europe vs US - we don't have any personal ego polishing at stake and chest thumping about how country XYZ is greatest, we take what we consider best for us, facts are enough.

Fearmongering about China is also less intense here, as if one had to realize that most top android models are not made in China, and one could construct a very effective and truthful fearmongering campaign about US too, since various US laws and 3-letter agencies consider all of us sub-humans and US government is quite often rather unfriendly and spying on us.

At least western part of Europe has average purchase power on par with US average, so phone prices (unsubsidized) are not a factor that much. Even when factoring in subsidizing in US, it doesn't explain whole picture on itself.

And we actually care about this tiny blue planet by our actions, so our actions are as they are (few phone replacements, ie I see most IT colleagues in our bank all making nice 6-figure US-equivalent salaries on pretty old phones, be it apple or android). You really can't impress anybody with your phone if we talk about mature folks, an attempt would cast a rather bad light on your character.

> Why switch context? Everybody that matters to everybody I now is on whatsapp.

Replace the word "whatsapp" with "iMessage" and you've described my situation. That's why I don't context switch. We're talking like once a year maybe I encounter someone not on Apple that says they're on something else. A similar situation happens with P2P payment apps. Someone may say let me Venmo you, but if you don't have Venmo you're more likely to just say I don't have Venmo and default back to traditional payments. Or counter with, do you have Zelle? (if you have Zelle).

My in-laws were expats and coming home to the US was always a huge culture shock because nobody here used WhatsApp. I know that's not true. There's probably some stats out there that show usage of WhatsApp and Android is very substantial in the US. However, unfortunately, I think that in a way those stats and my experience outline the class divide here. If you can afford it, you have an iPhone.

You might wanna check out yesterday's discussion about Signal loosing support for SMS and see adults perspective on this very subject.

> SMS conversations in iMessage lose features.

"Lose" makes it sound like they could be found. Are the features even possible to implement with SMS?

Technically yes, Realistically there isn't a need. The iMessage feature set has been mostly matched by RCS on Android. Apple does not want compatible messaging.

Google's version of RCS on Android is a proprietary closed source fork of RCS that Google refuses to provide a public API for.

> Google's version of RCS—the one promoted on the website with Google-exclusive features like optional encryption—is definitely proprietary, by the way.

If this is supposed to be a standard, there's no way for a third-party to use Google's RCS APIs right now. Some messaging apps, like Beeper, have asked Google about integrating RCS and were told there's no public RCS API and no plans to build one.

If you want to implement RCS, you'll need to run the messages through some kind of service, and who provides that server? It will probably be Google.

So the pitch for Apple to adopt RCS isn't just this public-good nonsense about making texts with Android users better; it's also about running Apple's messages through Google servers. Google profits in both server fees and data acquisition.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/new-google-site-begs...

SMS is a universal standard supported by even the oldest devices that will still connect to current cellular networks.

To be fair, I don't think Apple has opened up iMessage either, otherwise this problem would have solved itself already with a third-party app.

Apple has never claimed that iMessage is open.

It's Google that goes on about RCS being an "open standard" when their implementation of RCS is anything but.

It's kind of like going on forever about Android being open source before making sure most of the modern APIs are proprietary closed source code you only get with Google Play.

I don't think it's this simple. RCS is implemented by carriers and is a feature of mobile service like SMS. It has a qualification/accreditation process. iMessage is an internet service.

If I were Apple, I would not budge.

I haven't used iMessage, so I don't know how it behaves, but my own personal RCS experience has not been good. I am on Google Fi and make heavy use of Google Messages and specifically their web app. I have a Pixel 4a 5G - a good mid range phone. Three Messages configurations are available: regular SMS/MMS, RCS (i.e. Enable Chat Features), or SMS/MMS routed through Fi; RCS is not available if you route through Fi!

I have a couple of really long message histories, and with RCS enabled, it got to the point that I could not keep the web app connected with the phone, open chats, or in some cases see/respond to messages; I'd try to send a message and it would sit at 'sending' for 5 minutes or more, making it very difficult to have an actual conversation with someone. Turn RCS off, and the send/receive delay disappears. Route through Fi as well, and the web app works a lot better and it doesn't get stuck opening conversations.

As another commenter pointed out, it's probably better to use an actual chat application instead of Messages for this. But that's not what I use :shrug:. And my experience, on my phone, is that RCS is not usable at all, and I'm just on SMS/MMS as a result.

Respectfully, this comment solidifies why iMessage is superior. Try sending a 4K HDR video, or low-quality video, files, or photos with a resolution greater than a Nokia phone from 10 years ago, or a multitude of other things over SMS.

Signal, WhatsApp, etc. don't come close to what iMessage offers seamlessly. For iPhone/macOS/iPadOS users, SMS is garbage. Yes, it's a closed system; but it works without a cell signal or roaming charges anywhere in the world over WiFi for free.

RCS seems like a half-baked attempt at catching up with features that've existed since 2011 on one platform. Even third-party messaging apps fail miserably compared to iMessage.

> Signal, WhatsApp, etc. don't come close to what iMessage offers seamlessly

In what way? I know WhatsApp compress media files, which is why people use Telegram when high quality matters. Is there anything else? In any case Signal and WhatsApp have UX barely better than SMS, the real comparison should be against something with legitimately better UX. Is iMessage better than Telegram?

Oh I agree with you, and that's something I forgot to mention - if you do SMS/MMS routed through Fi, they downscale everything. Forget 4k video - any video you take is getting repackaged as a .3gpp file at very low resolution (144p? idk, it's pretty bad). Audio-only clips are similarly compressed a lot, and very noisy as a result. Images don't seem to be affected, but I haven't tried sending anything big.

It's not useless, but vastly better for short text conversations than anything else. Not surprising, it's SMS.

I read that carriers can't be bothered running RCS servers, so Google provides those for Android devices.

RCS is not SMS. It’s just some unrelated technology making a claim to succession because Google said so.

And the alternative is that they wouldn’t be able to participate at all.

In the end, I think the social rejection isn’t Apple to blame for. We don’t blame clothing brands for enabling kids to discern who wears ‘the real thing’ and who hasn’t, either.

Or do we want to blame Apple for trying to improve SMS for their users without going through a lengthy standards process? They were a small player at the time in the phone market, so they couldn’t expect an iPhone-only solution to succeed, and writing an app wasn’t really a thing yet, so they couldn’t have gone the route WhatsApp later took, so what could they have done instead?

The colors are UI to indicate to their users who has access to the improvements and who hasn’t. If Apple didn’t indicate in any way that some people have different features available to them, I think people would blame them for that.

Also, US (AFAIK, this is a US thing) kids likely would still learn who could and could not use the features Apple added to SMS.

> They were a small player at the time in the phone market, so they couldn’t expect an iPhone-only solution to succeed, and writing an app wasn’t really a thing yet, so they couldn’t have gone the route WhatsApp later took, so what could they have done instead?

Mate, iMessage debuted in 2011 - 2 years after Whatsapp appeared on the platform.

Why is the answer not to force interoperability? This is exactly what we should be doing because it's generally good for the communications ecosystem and the overall marketplace.

It's not an answer to the problem of teenagers having to learn decency, but I'm failing to see a downside to taking Apple to task on this.

> Why is the answer not to force interoperability?

Do you want the U.S. government to just strong-arm a private company into adopting a not-very-popular plaintext messaging standard, or do you want them to force the licensing of Google's proprietary extensions that support encryption for 1-to-1 messages as well? (Even with proprietary extensions, group messages are always plaintext.)

To also give up control back to carriers, so that they can sell you packs of RCS messages with your plan.

The US Government can declare that the companies involved must come up with a way to provide equivalent functionality when interoperating between platforms, and then the companies can figure out how best they want to do that.

Then every day that's not the case after a grace period, or without convincing evidence they're working on it, they can eat fines or sanction from the FCC.

I don't care how they solve this problem, just that they do and that's what effective regulation is about.

Force them to implement Matrix

The US government can mandate some amount of compatibility just as the EU recently mandated USB-C

Forcing interoperability sounds like a good idea, until you recognize that it results in a system of compliance that absolutely stands in the way of innovation for years if not decades to come. Look at seatbelts: the technology has come leaps and bounds in recent decades, with 5 point harnesses being common in racecars, however, you'll probably notice that the seat belts in your current car look a lot like the seatbelts in your first car, because of a government enforced standard. This is the issue with the EU's recent adoption of a mandate that all devices use USB-C (never mind if some of the proprietary chargers that were in use were able to provide a faster charging speed) as well.

Now, admittedly, it isn't impossible to have regulations like this revisited on a schedule to make sure they're still making sense and adjust them, but considering how well that approach has panned out for the USA-PATRIOT Act, I'm not holding my breath on politicians coming up with a reasonable solution here. If your kid complains about the phone they have, I suggest getting them a job application from the nearest retail store. If they're too young for that, perhaps it's a bit soon to have a phone in the first place.

Besides, it’s kind of absurd to imagine government regulation of bubble hue.

On the other hand, I’d love to see the government regulate Apple’s right to keep using port interface changes as financing events. Every time they change their chargers we’re forced to pay for the new ones which creates waste and is just plain shameless greed on their part. And of course Right-to-repair + Planned-obsolescence.

Except there is no meaningful innovation in instant messaging for decades now. This argument is boilerplate of all Apple-related discussions and yet I fail to see what would we actually loose.

Also argument about fast charging is invalid. You are free to have own faster standard, as long as you also support PD over usb-c and that non-issue, as all faster chargers(eg. One Plus), were already working over usb-c.

I don't see how your examples stand in the way of innovation. Both seatbelts and the type c requirement are written as minimum requirements, not as "no more no less". Extensions and improvements are allowed or even common, as long as they preserve the base functionality.

A car needs a seatbelt that passes whatever certification is required by law, but there's nothing stopping you from making it better. There are 5 point harnesses out there which are street legal, but the only people buying them are car modders who want to use their racing car on the street and managed to get the rest of the car approved already. Mainstream manufacturers have also experimented with fancier seat belts, but there was no market demand for them.

Type C is similar - the new law requires a device to have a type C port that supports at least all the basic functions. If a manufacturer wants to include their own improvements, they can either use the Type C port like everyone has been doing for years (Warp/Dash charge, QuickCharge, analog audio, thunderbolt 4...) and/or add a second connector. The only one who hasn't been taking this approach was Apple and they haven't done anything innovative with Lightning since it was introduced.

Hell, apple themselves pretty much taken this approach with every other product they have, so it’s not like they didn’t okay over USB-C for years. My guess would be that they deliberately waited out the EU mandate, so any minor public inconvenience that may come from ditching lightning can be forwarded to EU ruling instead of them, they are absolutely okay either way.

Come on, where are all that innovation that happened with lightning or any other cable type during the “unrestricted” decades? It is simply a plain-ass form factor for.. transporting electricity between two ends of a wire, it ain’t getting much better than what we have. Mind you, there is absolutely no mandates on the data part.

Is there some sort of lack of innovation allowing your vacuum cleaner to plug into the same system as your PC as well?

TIL that there are people who just use whatever messaging app came with their phone.

I may not like Moxie Marlinspike's decision to host Signal on the Play Store, but it's still the best SMS app out there for providing a moderate degree of privacy, and it'll run on iOS and Android (and desktop!) alike (though, on the desktop it only supports Signal-Signal messages, not other SMS).

Get ready to switch, because Signal is dropping SMS support on Android: https://signal.org/blog/sms-removal-android/

> but it's still the best SMS app out there

Not for long (see this other story currently on the hn front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/)

> On the other hand, this seems like a teachable moment, where perhaps kids can be encouraged not to marginalize others based on trivial differences in messaging apps.

If you think that something something inclusivity will effect your children’s thinking more than peer pressure, boy do I have news for you.

This is quite frankly utter bullshit unless there is a lack of parenting going on i.e. you brought your kids up to be judgy assholes.

My kids and their friends have a right mix of all sorts of phones. They don't even talk about it. They just work out how to deal with it. Mostly that results in them picking a common platform, usually Discord or Snapchat and using that.

This is not a technology issue!

Can't help but notice the irony of how much judgment is in this post

That point is recursive...

i have a compilation of screenshots from adults saying the same thing from dating

Still a parenting issue! Just a bit late.

Fortunately, an iPhone isn't strictly a luxury, as there is still a healthy market of second-hand and independently refurbished models available at a variety of price points. Apple's actions over the last few years threaten to seriously undermine this, though.

Humans will invent indicators of social status whether you like it or not. Get rid of green bubbles and something else will rise to take its place.

They'll just look at what's in each other hands. Or what's on their feet. Or what clothes their draped in. All as they always have.

Apple phones are cheaper and last longer than Android devices.

Then just buy an iPhone, or get over it? You're acting as if Android vs. iPhone is an immutable part of a child's identity. It's not.

You can get a totally workable used iPhone cheap, because they keep working for so long.

It's not like you need a lot of horsepower for texting. My kids take a beat up 8-year-old iPhone 6 out when they go to sleepovers and things. It still works fine.

The US is straight out of a dystopia from an European perspective.

iPhone = Dystopia?

No,

Dystopia = everyone must buy an iphone as solution to the problem instead of just using an app that's not restricted to iphones

I guess the difference is the attitude - “I will try to change my preferences to suit others” vs “I will try to change others to suit my preferences”

It isn't.

Two options: - everyone installs an app that can deal with multiple vendors (like 90% of the messengers) - everyone that is not having a phone of vendor x gets a new phone from vendor x and throws away the old one (or keeps both lol)

The former is almost for free and the latter costs hundreds of dollars .

It's so much worse that you cannot even make out this difference

Nationalistic flamewar, and any flamewar, is not ok on HN. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

You've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly, including elsewhere in this thread. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

Flamewar where?

Pejorative putdowns of countries are nationalistic flamebait, regardless of which country you have a problem with.

You should Google flamebait, which is also distinct from flamewar

Would you please just follow the site rules? You obviously broke them, and this petty objection-making is not helpful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> who can't afford to carry around luxury phones.

The solution is to buy an older iPhone second-hand.

Well, just use any of the litany of messenger programs out there that are available on every platform? I know there is a huge network effect, but I don’t think it is fair to blame apple here — they ought to somehow show whether a message goes from your SMS budget vs mobile data one.

(iPhone user here) It does seem to me that Apple isn't playing fair and this is no longer the technical issue it once was. Apple has so far refused to adopt RCS (the successor to SMS and MMS) which is now an industry standard for text messaging. Because of that, aside from the green bubble, the text messaging experience with non-iPhone users is subpar. Images and videos are compressed and things like tapback and group texts just stink.

https://www.android.com/get-the-message/

They have no incentive to adopt some external standard if 4 out of 5 teens will be adopting their platform in the not-too-distant future.

They do this on purpose. They know from focus groups this encourages lock-in.

RCS is not end-to-end encrypted. (But neither is SMS, I get it).

The fact that they're pushing a protocol in 2022 that has state-of-the-art design for fifteen years ago, is disingenuous, and is emblematic of all the chefs that have their hand in the pot with the Android ecosystem.

> RCS is not end-to-end encrypted.

While this may be some technicality in a spec, the reality is that all the people I know using Android are enjoying end-to-end 1:1 encrypted conversations using Google Messages. Group messages were announced to get e2e encryption soon.

> RCS is not end-to-end encrypted

RCS uses TLS, which is about as good as iMessage if you turn on iCloud Backups[0], as they just copy your private keys.

[0]: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/security-of-icloud-...

Why would apple give up this advantage?

Given the iPhone's marketshare, is it RCS really the industry standard?

Does the iPhone have a standard that other phones could adopt? Ie is your argument that Apple has been pushing an alternate standard, but Google is rejecting it? If so what is it?

I could argue the industry standard for interoperable messaging is still MMS. Because Apple.

Android is ~72% of the global market: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile

So, yes.

The month-day-year format is the standard for 4.23% of the global population, but it's the default in most IT systems, including every globally-deployed cloud system I have ever used.

What's your point?

You should say thank you for localization system.

Ah yes, that system where if I see a date like 11/12/22 on the web, then I can safely assume it is one of the following:

    12th of November 2022
    11th of December 2022
    22nd of December 2011

Until I see a "disambiguating" date in the exact same context, I have localization to thank for making it impossible to determine what I'm seeing.

And I mean exact same context, because there are web portal where you will see date formats in multiple formats on the same page!

But most of those Android users are on WhatsApp. So, it's really WhatsApp that's the global standard, not RCS.

You only need 15.6% of a market to claim there are no standards?

Given the source of the claim, are you surprised by the claim?

> Given the iPhone's marketshare, is it RCS really the industry standard?

It's funny to me seeing this statement, as half of the people out there push it the other way when discussing App Stores. "Well iPhone isn't a monopoly world wide."

Iphone users on android devices are also subpar. When you "like" a text or whatever those interactions can get sent as a new text. One iphone user in a group text can spam the entire group with a flood of pointless interactions.

That was fixed last year. https://www.androidpolice.com/google-messages-might-soon-han...

That's only if you're using google's SMS app. Many phones ship with something else (like Samsung's) as the default.

No reason Samsung can’t do the same.

Doesn't really matter whether they could do the same if they don't.

Samsung has started to ship Google Messages as the default:

https://9to5google.com/2022/02/14/google-messages-samsung-ga...

Isn't this because they're trying to make RCS universal and Google has that API locked down from anyone else using it while claiming "RCS is a universal open standard" lol. Typical "do no good" stance from the goog

That finally explains why I saw so many articles about how "Google fixed iphone responses on Android", but I never saw any evidence for it on mine.

RCS is less of an industry standard than iMessage.

Apple built something better. So did Google. Then Google killed theirs. Then they did the same thing three more times.

It's no wonder nobody wants to use Google messaging, and that Google resorts to smear campaigns. People would rather use WhatsApp spyware from FB/Meta or totally unencrypted Discord/Slack than bother with another Google IM product (which, let's be clear, is 100% what RCS is).

PS: Apple preserves a backdoor in the end to end crypto of iMessage for government surveillance that allows Apple to read all iMessages. iMessage isn't good either.

> PS: Apple preserves a backdoor in the end to end crypto of iMessage for government surveillance that allows Apple to read all iMessages.

That’s configurable. By default a user can access them from other devices, but that feature can be disabled.

It's on by default, so everyone you iMessage with has it on, and is sending your plaintext to Apple in the unencrypted iCloud Backup.

Your turning it off has no effect. Most messages are backed up twice.

It's (iMessage) not a standard if it isn't open for adoption by anyone else.

It doesn't matter how much better it is, if the only way to use it is via Apple hardware. It's their prerogative to do that, and it makes good business sense assuming it doesn't bring them monopoly problems (and IMO it probably shouldn't due to the aforementioned stats re: worldwide usage at 27%, and even US usage is only at 55%).

But it in no way is a standard. It's just a proprietary piece of software. So literally any other standard proposal is "more of a standard" than iMessage.

> Apple built something better.

I want to against this. Even if the app is well made, messaging platform only for specific company's devices is completely broken idea. Tragedy is that US people adopted completely broken platform.

It does fallback to SMS though, so in practice it’s compatible with non Apple devices.

I text Android users all the time and besides the green bubble I don’t see much difference honestly

Naive question here. What's the encryption story here with RCS?

What I like about iMessage is that I feel its relatively secure. Given the choice of trusting Apple vs a Frankenstein arrangement between Android and the various carriers, I'm inclined to go with Apple, unfair practices aside.

RCS with Google's implementation allows e2ee for two party conversations (finally, as of last year). It doesn't do e2ee for group chats, and other implementations don't provide e2ee.

Apple is the new Microsoft.

I don't want RCS. Keep iMessage for people and very very limited businesses please.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/04/google-disables-rcs-ads-in...

RCS is awful. It’s an out-of-date, encumbered “standard” with poor global commonality in adoption. It exists for one reason only - because US carriers wanted some way to keep charging per message like their old sms cash cow, instead of being reduced to just proving dumb internet piping. Despite that, the carriers couldnt even agree amongst themselves on the "standard" RCS features to deploy for 10 years or so, until google co-opted the effort for their own goals semi-recently. Let it die.

US carries haven't charged per message in like a decade.

No but when RCS was invented they still did because they hadn't lost the war with messaging apps yet.

That’s only sort of true. Consumers don’t pay directly, but the carriers charge each other for them, and they still make a lot off people injecting sms into the system (think twilio, marketing, 2fa, application generated traffic). RCS was aimed (and priced) to try and make lots of money off a2p

There are some bad points for RCS like encryption, but still it's far better for openess/compatibility compared to iMessage. Perhaps good to have as an alternative to MMS for fallback of iMessage.

It’s better than MMS is about the only good thing I can say about it. But that’s a terribly low bar

Show me an RSC server run by a carrier and I'd believe it.

Verizon: https://www.verizon.com/support/advanced-messaging-faqs/

AT&T: https://www.androidauthority.com/att-rcs-google-3121088/

Lol RCS a standard. Because Google says so, just as with so-called "web standards"? In the real world, people use WhatsApp, SnapChat, Insta, Telegram, Signal, and, in fact, iMessage and SMS/MMS.

I know the "green vs blue bubbles" gets a lot of press, but as someone who is not a teenager, and on the contrary is considerably past middle age at this point, that is not the real reason iMessage has a stranglehold on users.

I've got an Android, and I recently went on a vacation with a group of friends who all had iPhones. I did feel a bit like a leper in the group chat we had set up for our vacation, and it wasn't because of green and blue bubbles. Not only was the experience pretty broken for me, it essentially broke the experience of everyone else. I couldn't do emoji responses, which are a huge way folks communicate in group chats these days. Videos I received on my phone were essentially unwatchable. Videos or images I would send to the group would randomly just not show up on some people's phones. At the end of the vacation my good friend said flat out (jokingly, but still with a point) "Dammit hn_throwaway_99, just get an iPhone".

It's the breaking of group chats that makes iMessage the lynchpin of Apple's anticompetitive stance here.

SMS has always been pretty broken for group chats and multimedia. I don't think we can blame Apple for that

We could blame Apple for not making an Android iMessage app, though

Rumor has it that, despite Apple's public claims, one reason why is that iMessage is tied to a physical device. This helps keeps spam, malware, and banned devices all under control. Expanding to Windows and Android by definition means that iMessage can no longer have that per-device tie, which undermines these controls.

This is a total bullshit reason. Literally every other messaging app, including well regarded secure ones, have cross platform versions available.

Yeah, and that's exactly why I've never received spam through iMessage even once over many years (despite being active in a bunch of group chats and 1:1 conversations).

All while I receive whatsapp/telegram message spam on a fairly regular basis, despite not being active in any groups or channels on those apps (and in general, opening them maybe once or twice a week at most). The only reason I even use those 2 apps is to talk to select few old relatives of mine who are not very tech literate and who just happened to learn how to use those apps +a couple of friends who simply insist on using those apps.

I have the opposite experience for what it's worth.

To make sure I understand it correctly, you actually receive imessage spam, not sms spam? Because regular sms spam (green bubbles) could still arrive.

Oh yea it’s normal, but so what? Still sends me a notification

Then your point doesn't apply to iMessage. You receive SMS spam, not iMessage spam.

But iMessage has done nothing to lower the amount of spam I receive so I don't see any benefit.

That doesn't make a lot of sense to me

1. It's multi-device at least when we're talking about non-phones; that's one of its better features, being able to use it from your Mac or iPad

2. You can make an iMessage account without having an iPhone; just having an email/Apple ID and some other Apple device to use it from

3. If you had an Android phone, presumably you wouldn't also have an iPhone at the same time? And even if you were using it on an iPhone, it seems like nothing stops you from being logged in on a second iPhone

But points being:

1. RCS is now available and a standard. iMessage already "degrades" to sending SMS messages to those not on iMessage. There is no reason they can't better support RCS.

2. While MMS groups were missing a ton of features, there are just things now that are much worse as an Android user interacting with an iMessage group than it was previously in an MMS group. I.e. I never used to have issues with dropped images before, but in an iMessage group it's like a crapshoot whether my photos get delivered.

There's many reasons not to support RCS.

It is a bag of standard parts thrown together by a bunch of telecommunications companies in a desperate attempt to hold on to their 50c per message cash cow.

If you spend more than a minute actually looking into it, you'll realise that Apple would basically have to run it in a virtual machine for security, and then hand over control to a bunch of telcos that can't even all agree on what is and isn't included in RCS.

Still better than SMS/MMS. But apple can come up with a new standard if they want. Or... they can port the one they've already invented to android.

> It is a bag of standard parts thrown together by a bunch of telecommunications companies in a desperate attempt to hold on to their 50c per message cash cow.

But in the US (the market being discussed here) basically all US mobile plans include unlimited texting anyway...

Well then, why not use whatsapp or whatever the rest of the world is using?

I guess I'm old in that I basically never use emoji unless the platform changes something like :-) to one. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

SMS has supported Unicode since the very early 2000s. I remember getting SMS messages in Thai on my Nokia 7110 GSM when I was in Thailand in 2003. So there's no technical reason why iMessage fallback to SMS doesn't support emoji.

I received an emoji from someone using SMS ("green text") on my iPhone today, so it most certainly does support it.

I'm not talking about the ability to put emojis in text messages. I'm specifically talking about the way virtually all messaging apps these days (iMessage, Android RCS messaging, Slack, etc.) have the ability to do emoji reactions to previous messages, e.g. long press and add a thumbs up, heart, barfing, whatever.

Whenever I go in vacations with friends we talk. Rarely, we talk over the phone, otherwise we talk in person. Never text. That is the point of going together and not separately.

Seriously, do you not know any other app than "Messaging" and "iMessage"?

The sarcastic tone of your response is annoying, given that it misses the point.

Yes, I do, and I use them. But when I'm amongst a group of, say, 9 other iPhone users, who happily all already use iMessage (and already have existing chats among different subgroups of the members), telling everyone they need to switch over to a different, unfamiliar messaging app doesn't go over very well. It's difficult enough to attempt this among adults; it's not surprising that teenagers would laugh in the face of another kid who attempted a "Hey guys, let's all use Signal!!" request

No sarcasm

Hard for me to disagree with that. The reason I have an iPhone is that I was having trouble with the family group chat when my mom was in the hospital.

> At the end of the vacation my good friend said flat out (jokingly, but still with a point) "Dammit hn_throwaway_99, just get an iPhone".

My friend groups mostly communicate on WhatsApp (a lot of them are either international, or Americans with significant overseas travel). This is the first time I have ever been glad to be a WhatsApp user. Oh, and messages, photos, and emoji reaction show up just fine cross-platform.

Asking a friend to get a $xxxx device because the company you use is unwilling to make their silly messaging application cross-platform is extremely out of date.

It's worse than that. At our kids' school, they are required to have iPads for their school work. By default then, iMessage becomes pretty much the only game in town for them to message with their friends. If they want a phone that can also then participate in those conversations, iPhone is the only option, it's not even a choice. SMS isn't a thing, if you have any other phone, your friends with iPads only don't even have a phone number to send it to. Something like Discord is really the only other option, but that only seems to have any sort of mind share with kids who are more than just casual gamers.

My school district almost went down that road before making the much saner decision to buy chromebooks.

I find it strange how iMessage has become so important (for lack of a better word) in the States. I have had to use it for the last 2-3 months, as WhatsApp cannot be installed on my not-updated older iOS anymore, and I have to say that WhatsApp is way better at doing the messaging thing than iMessage.

Granted, I'm in my early 40s and I honestly didn't know that there were different "bubble colours" when using iMessage (depending on the phones that are part of the conversation, that is).

Although in the States, most people don't use WhatsApp by default unless they regularly text overseas (which most don't). I have it installed but there is like one person who I very seldom use it with. Another person I use Facebook Messenger with. Work folks I often use Google Chat for. Everything else is SMS/iMessage and, as a non-teen, I absolutely don't care what color the bubble is (unless there's some cost implication for international texting).

Text messaging is free for the most part in the US--and most people don't care about encryption details--so it's natural to just use what's built in.

Let’s not forget that on the original iPhone, all the bubbles were green because it only had sms. When iMessage came to the iPhone, Apple didn’t intend to rule the world with blue bubbles, blue was just an indication that you were talking to one of the few other iPhone users.

I definitely think part of it was to make those iMessages more visually appealing. I don’t think they knew how well it was going to work, but to some degree I do think this is what they were going for.

I mean it’s possible, but the messages icon on the iPhone is a green bubble itself. So are the phone and Facetime icons. I think Apple actually liked Green! They uses it on the most important apps on the phone.

> When iMessage came to the iPhone, Apple didn’t intend to rule the world with blue bubbles, blue was just an indication that you were talking to one of the few other iPhone users.

While I want to agree with that statement, Apple really makes it obvious that they try to make SMS suck compared to iMessage.

The biggest glaring example is the green and blue shown in their messaging app.

Their design guidelines literally for iMessage for businesses say contrast of text to background should be 4.5:1 or higher[0], but to target 7:1. Now what do their text bubbles comes out to?

iMessage(#FFFFFF/#4389F7): 3.4:1

SMS (#FFF/#68CD68): 1.99:1

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

Someone did a blog post about that, but it was actually misinformation (literally).

The Contrast between Green and Blue is actually roughly identical, it's just that both colors fade upward as time passes. So, the author picked a green bubble from higher up (which had faded), and a blue bubble from the bottom (which was fresh and dark), thereby comparing Apples and Oranges. Both have similar contrast when freshly sent and arrived, and similar faded contrast.

> Someone did a blog post about that, but it was actually misinformation (literally).

> The Contrast between Green and Blue is actually roughly identical, it's just that both colors fade upward as time passes. So, the author picked a green bubble from higher up (which had faded), and a blue bubble from the bottom (which was fresh and dark), thereby comparing Apples and Oranges. Both have similar contrast when freshly sent and arrived, and similar faded contrast.

You wanna check yourself? Because I pulled screenshots from my phone and tested this myself before I even posted that first comment.

I'll even go back and verify with the best case scenario that you stated of the color the very bottom pixel of a bubble at the very bottom of the screen (not counting the border).

SMS: #64C265 (100, 194, 101) or 2.2:1

iMessage: #377CEE (57, 128, 245) or 3.97:1

Heres the screenshots as well if you want to check: https://imgur.com/a/5nYhBSw

Why not even do the simplest thing of verifying before you try to claim "mIsInFoRmAtIoN".

EDIT: Re-reading this it has hostility in it, which I'm sorry for and apologize for. I am simply tired of people claiming "misinformation" on a topic while not even bothering to check the claim or to even try to backup what they claim themselves. I specifically went out of my way to check this, and include the exact color values. Only to be replied to with "well someone said XYZ" with no links, supporting information, or even an attempt at proving what they claimed.

Or an indication that I wasn't being f*cked by insane SMS fees.

Do people on androids in the US actually use SMS?

My experience in the UK and France is WhatsApp/telegram have basically 100% penetration and SMS is only used by businesses and 2fa

iMessage is a very US thing

... a very US thing for people with iPhones. Which exist in a ratio of about 9:1 vs Android users, apparently.

Yes. I've never used whatsapp or telegram. I use SMS weekly or daily.

Same here in Spain. I have not communicated over SMS with a real person for 5 years or so. Only thing I get is MFA and spam crap.

Same in Australia although American cultural bullshit tends to leak/be adopted. So the blue/green bubble probably will become a thing with our teenagers after they import it via social media.

I love the idea that somewhere, there are a bunch of high-priced antitrust lawyers having multi-hour serious discussions and debates about green and blue bubbles.

and what would those lawyers do? green just means sms. if you disable iMessage you should get that on iPhones too. there has to be a way to differentiate the method of sending texts, as they may incur some costs in some markets.

My two high scoolers are produ members of Android generation and apparently dong give a damn as long as they get to play games and chat on discord and text with girls. I am going to count that as a win against the industrial marketing complex.

You think giving them phones from an Ad company is a win /against/ the marketing industry?

Ahhh I see what you did there. No, totally, it is either succumb to apples marketing or support Google ad monopoly. I did try to give them the HTC windows phones that I had in reserve but there was a limit to their understanding...

I'd call it a win if you get them into rooting and custom distros like Lineage (which might give them a better overall appreciation of how tech works, encourage them to tinker, etc.)

Maybe... It's better than using Google/Samsung/whatever build of Android sure - but it's still feeding the google machine which is not a good thing. We need completely 'de-enterprised' Linux/BSD options.

*Edit

Yeah, I wish there were good Linux options for handheld touch devices. Though I'll have to say that Android rooting as well as Hackintosh experiments (among other things) definitely paved the way for me running Linux fulltime and going into the engineering field. Lineage and others still let you use the standard social apps so you can communicate, while providing a platform to experiment and debug when things go wrong.

With big-tech algorithms working against that, weakening their minds so they just accept the easy, clean route of what is put in front of them /s ... good luck :-)

The phones from an ad company let you use apps not made by the ad company with the same functionality. The phones from the luxury and ads company don't.

You can side-load any app you want onto your iPhone - you just create a provisioning profile.

Can you side-load an app that acts as the default maps link handler?

I don't know, I'm not your search engine - look it up.

The question was rhetorical. You cannot.

You realize Apple is turning these days rapidly into ad-too company. The money are too sweet and seemingly users don't care enough. And Apple's marketing is much stronger than Google's, just look a this whole thread...

Granted I don't live in the US, but is Apple even spending a lot on marketing the iPhone in later years? I feel like their success is based on social pressure/word of mouth more than bombarding the public with messages. At least where I live, most of the iPhone ads are made by carriers if anything

Yes they spend tons in Europe, and very cleverly. Every day I go around International school in Geneva, where children of the powerful of this world and future power holders study.

All ad posters around the school are currently Iphone 14. So are some ultra-premium locations within city. Nobody is doing as big ad campaign here as Apple.

And they know it works, peer pressure is pure emotion-based reaction, and teenagers are not yet experienced and smart enough to fight it.

What's a "green bubble"?

The way an SMS message is displayed in iMessage (sent from a non-Apple device, as opposed to a "blue bubble" for iMessage-to-iMessage messages).

Yeah, I had to google it too:

"If you see a green message bubble instead of a blue one, then that message was sent using MMS/SMS instead of iMessage. There are several reasons for this: The person that you sent the message to doesn't have an Apple device. iMessage is turned off on your device or on your recipient's device."

So apparently iPhone users see text messages from us Android users in a green bubble instead of a blue one. And apparently they've been conditioned to think this is icky?

it's not color it's functionality. a single non-iOS user being added to the group breaks the group texting behavior for the entire group

This sound horrible. What a bullying tactic from Apple.

It more means the group chat will all switch to using SMS (to include the non iPhone user) which isn’t as feature rich as using iMessage. It’s not a judgement on someone for their phone, it’s more that including their phone makes the group chat function worse.

SMS/MMS is icky. Absolutely shit protocol.

Your quoted source has that backward -- messages you've received always appear in light grey bubbles, regardless of whether they came in via SMS or iMessage.

It's only messages which you *sent* which appear in green or blue, to let you know whether each message was sent via SMS (which may have incurred a charge from your telco) or iMessage (which is free). At least to a casual glance, there's nothing on received messages to indicate whether they came in via SMS or iMessage.

In iMessage, which seems to be a thing in the USA (I don't know of any other market where it's a dominant messaging system), non-iPhone users participating via SMS appear to iPhone users with a different (green) background color to their message bubbles.

Your own messages appear in a different color, not theirs. At least not on current iOS.

It's so you know that the messages you're sending are going over MMS instead of iMessage, so zero features other than sending plain text to individual recipients will work well, if at all. It's like time traveling back to the late '00s with text-chat-groups inexplicably splintering mid-conversation, adding new participants screwing everything up, and potato-quality photo and video attachments that take forever to download and simply fail a good fraction of the time.

My friend group solved this by switching to WhatsApp. But if we'd all been iPhone users I doubt we'd have bothered, because iMessage is at least as good and, if you use some of the more-advanced features, much better, provided your chats are actually going over iMessage and not MMS.

iMessage is basically exactly the same as having a good messaging app just for iPhones plus a necessarily-shitty MMS one, except you don't have to switch between them because they're combined.

I distinctly recall Google trying to do the exact same thing when I was an Android user, must have been over a decade ago: on a major OS update, they replaced the texting app with some unified MMS/other-messaging-service (who could possibly keep track of them all? May have just been gchat, at the time) app. I had to "downgrade" to the old texting app because the new one was so broken that it was unusable. In particular, it lost messages all the time, or would switch mid-conversation between MMS and other-messaging-protocol, screwing everything up. iMessage is nowhere near that bad, at least, even when in "green bubble" mode.

> Your own messages appear in a different color, not theirs. At least not on current iOS.

Thanks for the correction! I understood that wrong.

But it still ends up drawing attention to non-iPhone users if they make the iPhone user's message bubbles go green on their ends.

> I distinctly recall Google trying to do the exact same thing when I was an Android user, must have been over a decade ago

I have the same memory.

See today's other story:

One trick Apple uses to make you think green bubbles are “gross”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33176668

Android users’ text message bubbles show up green, and you can’t send the “tapback” reactions (or rather, they show up as a “so and so has liked your post” rather than a thumbs up icon). This is annoying for Android users and it’s kind of tedious for iPhone users to have to vet group chats to see if there is a single Android user who might be annoyed. Apparently this is factoring into people’s phone purchasing calculus.

It actually only shows the "so and so has liked your post" on Apple devices unless they've changed it recently. In Google messages you see the reactions from iphone users as they should be shown.

Whoa, that’s great to hear. My Android-user friend said otherwise, but maybe she was misinformed or I misunderstood or something.

Maybe an old version of android but this has what it's look like on Google Messages. Think it changed sometime in the past year. https://i.imgur.com/GYHMkHy.png

Yeah, this was based on a months-old conversation, so I wouldn't be surprised if the feature just hadn't shipped yet or some such.

Tapbacks on text messages work on the iPhone side too. I just had the occasion to try that a few days ago.

It doesn't say "so and so has liked your post" on Iphone when someone has Android in a group chat now?

That's not the permutation I tried, so maybe in group chats it still happens that way. But in a 1:1 chat it worked fine.

All incoming texts, whether sms or iMessage, show up in a gray bubble.

Only your own outgoing texts are in a colored bubble

That's patently incorrect. Incoming texts from my Android-user contacts are green bubbles. Incoming texts from my iPhone-user contacts are blue. Source: I'm looking at my iPhone right now.

I think you should look again. Source: looking at my iPhone right now.

No, your iPhone does not magically work differently than everyone else’s.

Who tf uses imessage? Its all whatsapp, telegram or fb messenger or discord here. Sweden. SMS is not used. Only for... passwords, spam and reminders for packages.

87% of american teens

imessage/sms/texting is king in the US

How sad.

Its gonna come here too. And probably is here already but I am an out of touch old man. We love to ape america and all the kids wanna be in eupohria on hbo.

I don't it. It's been this way for a long time and if anything more people are moving discord or whatever.

Anecdotally, my twins (both 17) have been asking for Android phones since they got their first phone at 14. I thought they’d be excited to get iPhones because I read reports and stories like this, but it doesn’t appear to be universal.

perhaps it's because the adults they look up to aren't iPhone users?

This proclamation is likely triggering for the HN audience

It's basically social suicide for kids now.

But it's great for people like me, because I'm much less likely to be added to a family group text.

It's about as anti-competitive as you can get. Even putting aside the shortcomings of SMS, simply putting bright white text on an acid green background is visually nauseating. Why would a company that cares so much about aesthetic make this deliberately terrible visual design choice? If iPhone had a market share below 50%, this would be a terrible business decision. Turns out, since they have a very high market share, it's an excellent business decision.

> My two oldest children - 13 and 15 - have loudly proclaimed that having a "green bubble" would be worse than death.

They'll get over it quickly, since in reality (I also have two teens) all group chats with friends are "green bubble" chats because participants include Android users. They'll instead grow to loathe the "blue bubble" chats with their parents and/or guardians.

I read your comment to my wife and her response was “what is a green bubble?”.

We are living in Japan and here we only use Discord, WhatsApp, and Line for messaging.

I think the mobile phone market in Japan is also dominated by iPhones now?

Yes, but SMS/MMS has never been popular thus also iMessage.

I had hoped the younger generations would move away from being complicit in manufactured corporate status schemes, as a kind of rebellion against the terminally online & connected older generations. Sad to hear they're more compliant with these schemes than any other generation. Hopefully the next generation will rebel.

Everybody should just install Signal and be done with this nonsense. Teach children that when they use Imessages, Apple can intercept them. This is not a complete endorsement for Signal as decentralized E2EE protocols are better for other reasons, but Signal is the easiest for people to adopt.

Sounds like their attitude may be a good reason to get them android phones

They would rather be dead than be uncool! Yikes.

Generalizing here, but that sounds exactly like teenagers. No perspective, and under way too much pressure to conform.

And, on rare occasions, prone to hyperbole.

I was a profoundly uncool teenager and enjoyed life quite a bit. Buck the trend.

As a contrapuntal anecdata, I was profoundly uncool from primary[1] through teenage years[2][3] and was miserable for almost all of it.

[1] Parental unit is a teacher at the same school? Yeah, your life will be miserable.

[2] Come from a different part of the area? You must be [insert various insults here] for 5 years.

[3] Scholarship kid at a private school? Good luck with that.

it's not "pressure to conform" it's that you will end up gradually pushed out of friend gcs especially. it's not always intentional but there is 100% a certain amount of social isolation that usually results.

(p.s. this is actually a bit better than it used to be, everyone's a lot more comfortable doing a snap gc because it has most of the same features and the UX isn't dogshit like a mixed gc vs imessage.)

A lot of teenagers would rather be dead than uncool.

One day, someone will figure out how to become a "blue bubble" with an android, and that person will make a lot of money.

I'm sorry, but no they won't. They will make a small amount of money, and then will be sued into the ground by Apple if they ignore the mountain of cease and desist warnings they will get.

There have been a few attempts to make a cross-platform iMessage client (see: https://bluebubbles.app/), and they all require either genuine Mac hardware, or a virtual machine with spoofed serial numbers.

There already is a way but it does require an apple Mac or virtual machine:

https://matrix.org/docs/projects/bridge/mautrix-imessage

I use matrix bridges for all my chats (to Whatsapp, telegram and signal) so I could add iMessage too. But I don't have anyone in my friends or family that wants to use it.

> A lot of teenagers would rather be dead than uncool.

and the more we push this culture-magnified story about teenagers, the more this will might approach actually being true. An awful lot of teenagers would much rather be uncool than dead, actually like their parents, don't find school terrible and so on. But for some reason, our culture has been spinning a yarn about them for decades now that both stands in opposition to the truth, and has simultaneously reshaped it.

What astonishes me is how the mind of teens just cannot palpate the world they live in. Not to plagiarize Louis CK but even with an android flagship in their hands at 14, being cast away due to strange techno/market forces is enough to forget everything and suffer.

in 2050 kids will storm out because their pocket nuclear fusor isn't the trendiest. 'thanks moooom'

from someone who is not too long outside of high school and so maybe remembers this better:

imessage is specifically impactful because it doesn't exclude from individual communication as much as groups. you can still talk to your friends just fine but i remember being left off group texts because the experience is otherwise just so bad. can't add people can't react to stuff whatever.

what usually happens is there ends up being a second gc: 1 is ostensibly the "main one" with everyone in it and the unofficial second is with just blue bubbles. but communication usually ends up in the blue bubble one.

i will add it's not nearly so bad now, most people just do a snap gc but that wasn't the case e.g. 6 years ago.

This gives me an idea for my Halloween costume this year. I am going to be a green bubble. I am actually proud to be one anyway.

Since the green bubbles are an Apple issue appearing on Apple phones, the way you avoid them is by avoiding Apple phones.

suggesting teens avoid iphones, in a thread about 87% of teens having an iphone is a very interesting strategy

I would be so much ashamed by the education I would have provided to such kids, I would never tell this in public.

Same with mine!

Sounds unbearable. I hope they survive to adulthood as a green bubble.

Maybe you should start by not being a bitc* to your two children

Entitlement Overflow, common bug in teens.

That’s probably because feature-wise it is

Take away their phones, problem solved.

Is this a new thing? And if so, given that iPhone have been around so long why is this new?

It is definitely not new, at all.

Source: I am in my mid-20's.

what about whatsapp and signal, do kids not use them?

Seems like an opportunity to teach that it is folly to "Keep up with the Jones."

Wait till they hear that they can make purchases in other areas to "Keep up with the Jones" - fancy cars and McMansions. By then they will be fully enslaved to debt, but boy will they have that glorious glorious status.

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